1. Field
This disclosure relates generally to data processing of linguistic data, and, more particularly, to ontology-driven natural language processing.
2. Background
Natural language processing utilizes software to analyze and understand human languages. Understanding a human language requires knowing what a word or phrase stands for, and how to link concepts together in meaningful ways. One method in which this is accomplished is dictionary-based annotation. Dictionaries are prepared with lists of words, including common parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, conjunctions, etc. The dictionaries are then used to annotate each word in a phrase to be processed. Subsequently, post-processing must be done to eliminate redundant annotations by utilizing grammatical rules. Because of the large number of possible grammatical rules in a language, hundreds or thousands of rules may need to be applied to each word.